If only I had been the project manager...
The women's team's performance on last night's apprentice was SOOO disappointing. Last night's task was to put together a technology exposition for a senior's center, and teach the residents how to use the various technologies they selected.
The guys had it right. The right selection of technologies that would appeal to their audience, familiarity with the technology they selected so they could competently and successfully teach others how to use it, the right atmosphere and attention to detail to make the event appealing so people would want to attend. Of course the one guy that asked George for his opinion (and essentially saying with his question that he thought George was part of the "senior citizen" target audience for this exposition) probably should have just kept his mouth shut. But they ended up winning in the end :-).
The women SUCKED. They picked technology that was uninteresting or inappropriate for their audience (High Definition TV with complicated space age remote controls that I wouldn't be able to operate let alone teach someone else to; heart rate monitors for tracking your heart rate during those high intensity cardio workouts that you, as someone over the age of 75, are likely to be engaging in on a daily basis - hey, don't take that the wrong way - I know there are a lot of folks who are still active well into their 80s and I intend to be one of them when I'm that age, but I doubt they'd really find wearing a heart rate monitor that interesting, and the idea was to appeal to the majority of the audience), they didn't bother to become proficient in the technology themselves before having to teach it to others, and right down to the misspelling of "technology" on the cake that they were serving, the event was poorly planned and executed.
So - here's what I think I would have picked as the technologies if I had been project manager of the women's team but first, I would have validated my choices (or changed them if necessary) by interviewing some of the people to find out more about their interests, hobbies, current lifestyle and communication methods and tools. And you can bet I would have made damn sure that each "instructor" on my team had the basics down before turning them loose to teach others:
E-mail - sending and receiving email, attaching photos, viewing, downloading and saving photos received in email
Instant Messaging - text, voice, and video - what better way to communicate with family and friends far away, especially when webcams are so cheap, and video messaging is so easy and a relatively decent experience now?
Digital Photography, picture sharing, basic blogging / online scrapbooking using something easy like MSN Spaces
Computer basics - like surfing and searching the internet, installing applications, changing you desktop picture (who wouldn't want photos of their grandkids instead of the standard Microsoft background - which incidently reminds me of the teletubbies for some reason)
Sigh.
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